Hers the Kingdom Read Online Free

childless, wrote back in the stolid, stilted style of a woman who was not comfortable with words, but Mama was not daunted. After a while, I think, it didn't matter who was reading the letters. All that

mattered was that Mama could write them and post them. Other than several editions of the New Popular Atlas of the World , which she pored over and used as a source of names for her offspring, the letters to Aunt Emma were Mama's only connection to the outside world.
         The letter that arrived in February began, as all of Aunt Emma's letters began, "Dear Good Friend." She wrote: "Your letter of the 14th inst. arrived with its welcome news of your family. We are well here, though the Captain complains of late of a weakness of limb."
         Aunt Emma and my father must have been much alike; it was as if words pained them.
         "I am putting pen to paper," Aunt Emma went on, "for a particular reason. On several occasions we have had the pleasure of having as a guest on the ranch a young gentleman, Mr. Owen Reade. On his last visit he was stricken with an illness, and at our insistence stayed with us to recuperate. Only after three months was his strength regained.
         "He is an agreeable young man and during his long recuperative time I sought to distract him by reading those parts of your letters in which you talk of the children. At the end of his time with us, he asked permission to write to Willa, for the purpose of stopping at Porter Farm on his next trip to the East.
         "Owen is twenty-seven years of age. His mother died when he was but a babe, his father passed from this life ten years ago, leaving his only son a sizeable bequest from his manufacturies in New England. The Captain knew his late father and vouches for his character. He fully endorses the young Mr. Reade, in whom he places much confidence.
         "Owen finished his studies at Princeton College, then he traveled widely on the Continent as well as throughout the American West. His travels have taken him many miles, as a result of which he has been able to enlarge the inheritance left to him. Neither is he content with this success, but is ambitious and has many fine plans.
         "He neither drinks nor smokes, but believes both to be vices and not amenable to good health. Having suffered fevers in his childhood, Mr. Reade is careful of his health.
         "He is, we believe, a man who would have won even Willa's grandmother's approval."
         Aunt Emma's recommendation of Owen Reade ended on that strange note, which might have been read as caustic, given the family history.
         A short time later Willa received a formal letter from Owen Reade posted in San Francisco, asking her kind permission to visit on his way to his family home in the East. His letters were brief, correct.
         Mama, caught between conflicting loyalties, became querulous. She could deny her friend nothing. Still, it would have occurred to her that it could be happening again—the caller, the sudden leavetaking, the absence forever. Emma had left her, and now Willa might choose to leave. And with someone Grandmother would have approved of. It was too much for Mama to grasp, too much to try to sort out. All she knew for sure was that she could never comprehend why anyone would want to leave the farm. And yet her mother had not been happy there and Willa . . . Willa was as much an enigma to Mama as Mama had been to Grandmother.
         Grandmother had longed for the old life; she had wanted nothing so much as to go back to Virginia. For Willa, it was Ultima thule —West, she would say to me, arms flung out, to the farthest point . . . West to the light, to build the kind of life where anything, everything was possible.
         They were three generations of women, each caught in a web of place the others could neither see nor comprehend.

    It was an amazing time, that week in the spring of 1887. The house was filled with an altogether new feeling of